Western Digital My Passport 2TB Portable Hard Drive Review

Need big storage on the go, but refuse to lug about a full-sized hard drive enclosure? If the term “2TB” sound good to you, then Western Digital’s got you covered. The company recently updated its My Passport line to include the beefiest storage possible in such a small enclosure, so join us as we take a look at just what it’s made of.

CrystalDiskMark, ATTO, Real-World

Over the past year, many storage companies have been jumping on the CrystalDiskMark bandwagon to help strut their product’s performance, and it’s easy to understand why. Compared to others, CrystalDiskMark delivers results that are much higher, and in some regards, they could be considered unrealistic given that real-world tests and even other synthetic benchmarks never seem to back up its claims. We include it for the sake of interest and because it is still a very thorough benchmark.

As expected, WD’s drive performs quite a bit better than the basic USB 3.0 flash drives, but falls short of those that use much higher-grade NAND. A report of 107MB/s write speeds is nice to see, given the overall storage capacity of the drive.

ATTO

While CrystalDiskMark does well to show the absolute top-end value of a storage device, ATTO doesn’t fall too far behind, if at all. Its test uses a wide-range of cluster sizes, for both read and write, but we only note 4KB, 64KB and 1024KB of the former. For those interested, we use a queue depth value of 10 for testing.

According to ATTO, our WD drive had the best 4K results of the bunch, while its 64KB and 1024KB performance once again aligns with what we’d expect… at around ~100MB/s.

Real-World

For real-world testing, we use a set of files and folders for the sake of measuring transfer speeds, and also convert images and music on the storage device to see just how well it fares for large intensive operations. For the transfer speeds, we use both 4GB and 16GB files and folders, and for the former, we also perform copy tests, which refers to copying the file or folder on the storage device. We don’t do this for our 16GB files and folders as some 32GB drives refuse it due to coming so close to the total density.

Our real-world performance results back-up what we saw with our synthetics. With a solid 16GB file, we sustained a write speed of about 111MB/s (important to note that it was copied from an SSD, so there was no bottleneck), and a folder featuring thousands of files at 50MB/s. Both performance ratings are little different than what we see on desktop hard drives, so the My Passport drive is hardly a slouch.